LITERARY CRITICISM OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IN MID-VICTORIAN ENGLAND

This study analyzes the criticism of children's literature which appeared between 1839 and 1865 in a selected group of major mid-Victorian periodicals: the Examiner, the Spectator, the Quarterly Review, Fraser's Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, Household Words, and All the Year Round. 1839 marked the publication of Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House, one of the first works of children's literature to move away from a rigidly didactic approach. In 1865, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland not only rejected didacticism, but parodied some classic works of didactic children's literature. In the years between these two milestones, Victorian children's literature attempted to achieve an appropriate balance between instruction and amusement and, simultaneously, became more diversified. Fantasy and original fairy tales, adventure stories, school stories, nonsense verse, and domestic chronicles developed into distinct categories of children's literature. The increased complexity of juvenile literature required criticism of the subject to become more complex as well. It was no longer possible to evaluate children's books solely in terms of their moral-didactic function; the emergence of a more liberated and sophisticated children's literature raised new and difficult questions concerning the responsibility of authors to juvenile readers, the need to define literary standards for various forms of children's literature, and the use of children's literature as a vehicle for an author's beliefs. The major challenge confronting mid-Victorian critics of children's literature was the need to assess children's books simultaneously as literature, as entertainment, and as expressions of moral and religious beliefs. Critics and reviewers did not wish to eliminate didacticism from children's literature, but asserted that instruction must be integrated with amusement within a context of literary excellence. They did not encourage the smuggling in of moral messages under the guise of superficial entertainment, but sought a genuinely organic relationship between story and moral. The contrast between critics' recommendations and the obtrusive didacticism in many children's books is conspicuous during the mid-Victorian period, when much of the criticism of children's books constituted a protest against, rather than an endorsement of, the prevailing mode of children's literature.